Once a Runner
A couple things to talk about today that have little to do with what I actually did today. First, I’ve decided that if I can stick with the training plan I made up for three weeks, I’ll sign up for the local end-of-summer half-marathon before the price goes up in July. Here’s my back-of-the-napkin 10 week training plan:
Week 0: 3x800m ✅
Week 1: 3 mi ✅, 5 mi (I loaded 175 bales of hay and ran 3 miles the next day — I count it)
Week 2: 4x800m, 3 mi
Week 3: 7 mi
Week 4: 6x400m, 4 mi
Week 5: 9 mi
Week 6: Here in my typing out my program I realized I mistyped in my Notes app and did not include a week six.
Week 7: 3x1 mi, 5 mi
Week 8: 11 mi
Week 9: Traveling to Colorado to see a friend — easy 3 mi.
Week 10: Race week, 13.1 mi
Looking at the plan now — especially realizing it’s only nine weeks, not ten (there’s a Week 0 because Week 1 is when I decided this plan, but I wanted to include my track workout two weeks ago in my race prep record) — I am thinking it would be a good idea to cut the 11 mi week into maybe a 5 mi and 6 mi day back to back, or maybe two 7 mi days with recovery, or maybe even just a 7 mi. In any case, the determinate weeks, this one and next, I need to do in full to put down the money to register.
The next thing on my list is to discuss my recent reading. I’ve just finished Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.
Hannah Coulter
Wendell Berry is a farmer in Kentucky and he writes novels set in a fictional farming town near a river called Port William. I tried many moons ago to read Jayber Crow and for some reason failed to get through it, but then I picked up Hannah Coulter and… I don’t know, is falling in love the right phrase for it?
Ah. Here. I realized this this morning. Hannah Coulter is my favorite book. It took me a bit to put that to words — I’ve never had a favorite book before, my whims change too often and there are some books I’ve bothered to put on my bookshelf but fewer that I’ve bothered to read more than once. This most recent reading is only my second, but it has convinced me even more than the first go-round that I need a copy of my own to put on my shelf.
Hannah Coulter, more than any other book I’ve read, calls me to be a better person and a harder worker. It describes the life of a farmwife in rural Kentucky born in 1922, widowed by WWII but together with her family and what she calls the “membership” of the town of Port William, continues to build their lives of good work, good community, and good place.
It’s a collection of stories and I’m sure it romanticizes the era and the profession of farming. But it recognizes hard work, and hard loss, and the gratitude that must abound in grief because of the love that grief signals.
Maybe I’ll write more about this another time. For now, I’m finally placing that order for my own copy.
Liz Gilbert
I’ve also been reading Elizabeth Gilbert. I found her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love in a little free library and decided to give it a re-read. In case you missed the Julia Roberts rendition, Liz went through a really ugly divorce in her mid-thirties and took a trip around the world to try to deal with it. She traveled to Italy to eat as much pasta as possible and experience pleasure, to India to practice spiritual devotion and meditation, and to Bali to attempt a practice of balancing pleasure and devotion.
I appreciate the way Liz writes about divorce and am inspired by her experience of meditation and spiritual exploration. I’ve also read her book Big Magic, which talks about creativity as a spiritual practice (a la Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way… I would love to re-read Big Magic now that I have read TAW), and two of her novels: The Signature of All Things and City of Girls.
After finishing Eat, Pray, Love, I picked up her next memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage from the library. This volume discusses much of the historical, sociocultural background of marriage while telling the story of how she ended up marrying the lover she met in the Bali portion of her EPL trip so that he, a Brazilian native and Australian citizen, could continue to live with her in the United States. A couple notes:
Statistically speaking, marriage is great for male health and well-being and not-so-great for females
She talks about how several sociocultural revolutions — including Christianity and communism — seem to begin with placing celibacy and devotion over marriage, but then when (a) the Second Coming didn’t happen right away and/or (b) people keep on getting hitched anyway the powers that be reshaped the narrative to give them more control over marriage by making it a holy institution
In the end, she says she comes to peace with marriage because in a way, it’s a subversion of authority to get married, to choose your partner based on love and affection, but based on the rest of the book, she would not have been able to come to peace with her situation if she had been earlier in her career or of childbearing age — both of which make marriage a legitimate sacrifice to women
I’m wildly fascinated to read her upcoming book, All the Way to the River, which apparently details how she fell in love with and grieved her best friend Rayya, who had been diagnosed with cancer and subsequently passed away in 2018. I want to see what if anything carries over from her writing on marriage, love, devotion, creativity, and spirituality. But I’ll get to wait until September for all of that. I think that’s plenty of time to give Big Magic a re-read.
Today I…
Raked a field of alfalfa
Mowed my lawn at home
Spent two hours on job boards and applied to maybe 4 administrative assistant positions
Picked up a hold at the library and wrote this post
Today I felt…
I despise job boards, but feel I can’t/shouldn’t complain too much since my position is after all self-imposed and gives me ample time to job hunt. The job description of an Executive Assistant gets me very excited but at the same time incredibly nervous — they always include the phrase “works well under pressure” and “multitasking” — so that’s why my applications were for administrative assistant positions. I think that I’d like to give it a go at the entry level and see if my excitement is something that translates to real life performance.
I was lucky enough to do my farming in the morning, but will need to continue my heat acclimation to make it through the rest of the week/the summer.
Tomorrow…
No farming tomorrow, so I’m going to aim to do this week’s track workout, spend a bit more time job hunting, let myself do some crafty project, and then try to spend some more time outside in the afternoon. Until then.